Here is someone working for the ABC, from a Labor background as Hawke’s press secretary, who has written about the rise and fall of a Labor Prime Minister with all the distortions and omissions worthy of the most disingenuous right wing hack.

Unlike Rudd, Turnbull does not lead a technocratic shell that is happy to leave its policies to its leader, but Australia’s last political party that is still desperately thrashing around on what it stands for.

So by the end we got to the real nature of Costello’s ‘pretensions’ to the leadership, less about his ambitions than about a media and a political party refusing to face the vacuum in front of their eyes.